I don't teach literature from my perspective as 'Joyce Carol Oates. ' I try to teach fiction from the perspective of each writer. If I'm teaching a story by Hemingway, my endeavor is to present the story that Hemingway wrote in its fullest realization.
The best American writers have come from the hinterlands -- Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, Hemingway, Faulkner, Wolfe, Steinbeck. Most of them never even went to college.
What I think is the most important thing to learn about any instrument is the basics of music. Learn your ABCs before you write a Hemingway novel.
Come on, man. . . . Hemingway, Sexton, Plath, Woolf. You can't kill yourself before you're even published.
Just to put that in some context, 1954 was the same year that From Here to Eternity won an Oscar. Swanson's manufactured its first TV dinner. The Army-McCarthy hearings were televised. The term "under God" was inserted into the "Pledge of Allegiance. " Steve Allen's Tonight Show premiered. Ernest Hemingway won the Nobel Prize for Literature. And Bob Dylan was bar mitzvahed.
I am not a Hemingway aficionado.
I was under the influence of the early modern masters, Fitzgerald and Steinbeck and Hemingway, especially, when I was a kid. I reacted against writers like Barth and John Hawkes. I did not care for the post-modernist stuff; my allegiance was to realism.
Once, in an interview with 'V' magazine, I said that I preferred Fitzgerald to Hemingway. I think that Hemingway is an amazing writer, but by being related to him, I had it in my head that I had to like him.
I think I succeeded as a writer because I did not come out of an English department. I used to write in the chemistry department. And I wrote some good stuff. If I had been in the English department, the prof would have looked at my short stories, congratulated me on my talent, and then showed me how Joyce or Hemingway handled the same elements of the short story. The prof would have placed me in competition with the greatest writers of all time, and that would have ended my writing career.
Gertrude Stein really thought of Hemingway as frail. He almost married Stein.
In middle school I wrote a paper on Hemingway and none of the sentences had more than five words.
Ernest Hemingway has been the most important influence on me as a writer. But at a certain point as a writer, I realized that he was writing about good people doing good things. This did not match my experience of life and so I found my sentences stretching and becoming less plain.
I guess for me Hemingway is a lot like it is for others: he goes down well when we are young.
You're not going to make Hemingway better by adding animations.
It has been said that Ernest Hemingway would rewrite scenes until they pleased him, often thirty or forty times. Hemingway, critics claimed, was a genius. Was it his genius that drove him to work hard, or was it hard work that resulted in works of genius?
In For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway cozies up to revolution by romanticizing it (and not only with those execrable love scenes).
What’s ready? Was Steinback ready? Hemingway? Shakespeare? Dickens? Jane Austen? They just did it, didn’t they?
Hemingway was a jerk.
Mike Walker is the Hemingway of gossip.
Like Hemingway and Faulkner, but in an entirely different mode, Fitzgerald had that singular quality without which a writer is not really a writer at all, and that is a voice, a distinct and identifiable voice. This is really not the same thing as a style; a style can be emulated, a voice cannot, and the witty, rueful, elegaic voice gives his work its bright authenticity.